


The Thousandth Man

by athousandwinds



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-26
Updated: 2010-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-06 17:40:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athousandwinds/pseuds/athousandwinds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack's a people person, but he's always ended up alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thousandth Man

**Author's Note:**

> The title refers to Kipling's "The Thousandth Man".

Jack had always been alone – well, not always, but he'd only ever told one person about that. If you didn't count the mission report, of course, and Jack didn't. (The base therapist had tried to get him to tell him about it, until Jack'd found a more enjoyable way to spend their sessions.) He didn't let people close, he was a mysterious kinda guy.

"You're fooling yourself," Arxa said once, her long eyes drooping like a bloodhound's. Jack had laughed, because he fooled other people sometimes and always fooled around _with_ them, but he never tried it on himself.

Halfway round the universe with only a backpack for company made anyone a loner. Making connections just wasn't worth it when you were only going to spend the day. There wasn't time.

"There's always time!" a man whom Jack met once insisted. "I mean, look how fast we became friends!"

"Sure," Jack said, amused. He kissed the guy's shoulder (he was way too skinny and had the chirpy, curious look of a clumsy baby bird) and added, "Why did you hug me?"

"No reason." The sharp face took on a guilty cast. "I like hugging people. Is it illegal here?"

"It's Victorian England."

"Oh." The man considered this. "Nah, it's fine. I'll just tell 'em I'm French."

Jack appreciated his camouflage skills in pleasant not-quite-silence for another couple of hours before he had to go. There was a rebellion going down in Calcutta and a good agent never missed hir boat.

"Don't do it, Jack," the man said, his expression like marble, and sad. Jack drew his gun.

"You know, it's not nice to sleep with a guy and then threaten him." He aimed it at the man's chest. "Breaks my heart, buddy."

"I'm not threatening you." The man reached out; mesmerised, Jack let him push the barrel of the gun to the right. "There, that's a better shot. But I told you, Jack. I'm your friend."

"I don't have friends," Jack told him.

\---

 

"Oh, yeah, you're the Lone Ranger, you are." Rose made a silly face at him; Jack made one back. It was good to be a twelve year old. "The TARDIS is your horse-thing."

"The TARDIS is _my_ horse-thing, thank you." The Doctor tapped the console with his hammer to emphasise his point. Being with the Doctor and Rose was a bit like playing a game of cross-dimensional tennis with six opponents. Balls of obscure twentieth-century pop culture were flying in all directions, some of them aimed directly at Jack's head.

He was good at dodging, but sometimes – hell. You could tell he'd been a science geek at school. Jack sighed and opened his hands.

"I had a pal once, it didn't work out."

Rose rolled her eyes. "Yeah, well. I tried cooking once, that didn't work out either. Doesn't mean I'm never gonna try it again."

"We can only dream. Anyway, it's really not the same thing."

"OK, I've had a boyfriend before. There, now it is."

"You could cook Mickey!" the Doctor offered, his grin suddenly cheerfully disturbing. It was one of his favourite expressions; the other one was just plain disturbing.

"Yuck, no." Rose wrinkled her nose; it was cute. "Sometimes you worry me."

"Sometimes _you_ worry _me_." The Doctor frowned, reaching out to smooth his hand over her forehead in a parody of a real doctor. "But then I remember: oh! You're human! That always explains it."

Jack laughed as Rose slapped the Doctor's hand away. "I guess I'll stick around. If you want."

\---

 

Jack had a generous attitude to art. If someone wanted it, let them have it. Plenty more where it came from. You could make a copy yourself and sell it for millions and in the end it really, _really_ didn't matter who had it.

He was biased, but that was what hanging off the side of a twenty-storey building did to a guy.

"Did you get it?" Rose hissed.

"You know," Jack offered at the top of his voice – the vicious crosswinds had rendered Rose almost inaudible – "We could've just tipped off the law."

"What?"

"Never mind."

Since they'd already been imprisoned by Politch's security guards (twice – the Doctor had managed to get them lost on the way out of their first escape attempt), Rose had laser handcuff burn on her wrists and Politch owned slaves, during the second escape the Doctor had decided to liberate some of Politch's priceless private art collection. Most of it technically belonged in a museum, but Jack was losing sympathy for the Amians' artistic heritage with each sway of the trellis.

"Where's Indiana Jones?" he shouted at Rose. She was almost on the ground, but Jack didn't look down. That way lay madness.

"I think he's talking to Politch's slaves."

The reassuring weight of the backpack was dragging on his shoulders, and Jack scrambled down the last few feet with no small relief. He swung the bag off and handed it to Rose.

"All yours."

Rose sat down cross-legged and drew the strings open before taking the statue out. It was a foot high, made of marble and resembled nothing so much as a deformed piglet. She frowned.

"Is this it?"

Jack ducked his head into the sack, fishing around for a moment before surfacing with a plastic placard.

"It's the depiction of the human condition; that of eternal solitude. Considered the peak of fiftieth-century art, it symbolises the essential loneliness of mankind."

Rose stared at him. "Seriously?"

"Yep."

"Forget it," she said with deep conviction, and flopped down onto the grass. "Let's just wait for the Doctor to get back."

Jack patted the statue on the head with some sympathy, before replacing it in the rucksack where it belonged and lying down next to Rose. She threw an arm over his chest and yawned loudly, burrowing into his side.

"How long d'you think he'll be?"

\---

 

The first time the Doctor said _it_ to Jack, Jack stared stupidly at him. They were in the middle of accidentally bringing down the Herzebalivian government from inside the palace and the Doctor was smiling.

"You know, I'd much rather cut and run," he tried, like poking a healing sore.

"Right! Volcano day. But since we both know you won't, why don't you get on with hacking into the mainframe?"

"You don't know it," Jack said in a poor attempt to salvage some of his self-respect, but he sat down anyway.

"Jack, I trust you." The Doctor gave him an exasperated smile. "Of course I know it."

Once Herzebalivian proletariats had wandered into the ruins of the palace and two teachers and a librarian had tried to discuss democratic theory with Rose, Jack found the Doctor again.

"Why do you trust me?"

Jack didn't often feel stupid, but sometimes the Doctor looked at him as if he were. "I like you."

"Is that all?"

The Doctor put a hand in Jack's hair and kissed him soundly. It was done as casually as Jack ever had, because the Doctor looked only affectionate when he pulled away. "You're a good man, Jack. Don't forget that."

Jack had always wanted to pass that particular buck off onto somebody else. Good men didn't back away when there was trouble; good men stayed until the end. Good men got tortured and died while lesser men listened to it and lived, but that was just the way the world worked.

Rose had finally detached herself from her new friends and was coming up the slope. "Are we ready?"

"Yeah," Jack said, the words coming with more ease than he could remember. "Let's go."

\---

 

Jack was a people person. The sort of guy who ended up alone in a crowd, but what could you do?

He sometimes wanted to find that guy again, the one who'd claimed to be his friend with such loving earnestness. He'd never found out his name – because of the mind-wipe, maybe. The last thing he remembered was getting on the boat to India.

He missed the Doctor and Rose more, though, with an aching, empty sense of loss. There'd been a thousand things they hadn't known about him or him about them, that they'd none of them had time to discover.

Fucking time.

That guy'd had the nicest smile this side of the Milky Way.

He kept looking.


End file.
